Imagination and Memory

I looked at the marathon schedule last week and realized that the mileage was now getting serious.

Saturday had me down for 19 miles. I had not run that far in a few years, and in spite of having done a great deal of PT and the gradual build-up using the Hal Higdon Intermediate Plan, I was nervous. I am not competitive in terms of running fast, but always want to finish, and imagined myself getting to about 15 and folding up like a cheap piece of lawn furniture.

I took my rest day Friday, and that night ate a small piece of salmon, some rice, salad, and water. So far so good. I got to bed early. Okay, on target. Then I woke up at 1:00am, 3:00am, and 4:00am. Great. Sabotaged by my screwed-up sleep cycle. For a moment I thought of switching the 19 out to the next day in hopes of a better night’s sleep. Discouragement, I told myself, is the easy way out. I got up, filled my fuel belt, had some coffee, and headed to the lake. You train to go with what you get dealt that day. Training is experiencing all the things that can go right and all the things that can go wrong.

On marathon day you might have only gotten a couple hours’ sleep. On race day it might be broiling hot or freezing cold. One year it was around 80 degrees at the start of the Boston Marathon, and another year a full blown North Atlantic Nightmare storm rolled in.

Regardless of the endeavor, whether it is our family, job, friendships, school, or hobbies and interests, we are not well served by staying home or shutting down because all the conditions don’t meet with our specific requirements or comprise the best-case, most safe scenario.

On the days where we want to stay home, like I did when faced with the prospect of running 19 miles on little sleep, we can use our memory and imagination to see ourselves doing the one thing that seems impossible to us at the time.

We can remember ourselves being kind and patient with our children and pull that memory into the present to serve as a mental model that will get us through a tough encounter. We can imagine ourselves focusing on the most important priority at work and actually getting it done. We can see ourselves repairing a broken relationship and believe we can do it by remembering when we have done it before. We can remember the times God was there for us in the past, even if there is nothing but silence now.

As we grow older we can drift away from using our imagination and memory. The work world often talks a lot about innovation and creativity, but if you told your boss you were going to spend a couple days imagining what innovation might look like, I am not sure what the reaction would be. We are to produce, and imagination does not often count as production. We must regain our imagination by putting it into practice in simple ways. We do not have to be George Lucas (even though that would be really cool).

The weather last Saturday was perfect. For a runner, perfect usually means somewhere in the mid 50s- low 60’s, and for some reason in Omaha in mid-August, that is exactly what I got. When I started running I decided to imagine myself finishing, regardless of how tired I was. I imagined my GPS turning from 18.99 to 19.00. I imagined going into Lifetime and taking a shower. I remembered the times I had run that far before. I remembered that I could do it.

My legs started to hurt at about mile 15, and for a brief moment I imagined the crumpled lawn furniture, but then a quote came to me out of nowhere, from the great A.C. Green of the 80s LA Lakers: “Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.”

I don’t know if I am tough or not, but I finished. This week is 20 miles. I can imagine it will be tough.